Looking for a budget compact camera?

Digital cameras are extremely useful and practical. Budget models have become popular choices for people who only need a camera for their personal use, rather than for professional purposes. These models can be extremely cheap, with some excellent products costing £50 or less.

It’s important to consider how many megapixels you’ll be getting. While more megapixels are obviously great for higher resolution pictures, you are unlikely to need more than six to ten for most practical purposes.

Memory is also an important part of shopping for a budget camera. While very cheap models may be tempting, you should always ask how many pictures it’s capable of saving and storing as you may need to buy a bigger memory card.

Think about whether you’ll want to record video with your camera. This can make it slightly more expensive, and often any recorded video will take up file space which could otherwise be dedicated to storing images.

Our cheapest compact cameras

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Type

Megapixels

Indicates the resolution or quality of the picture. A mega pixel is a million pixels where every pixel is a dot and its size is decided by the resolution. Cameras that can handle more than 2 million pixels have the capacity to produce pictures that can be printed in A3 format, meaning you can print a photo in A3 format without a noticeable impairment of the picture.Please not that effective and total megapixels are not the same. The effective pixel count is the number that matters, because this is the actual number of pixels that can be used for recording an image.